I believe I did it by the book. Which would be your suggested stable
Oracle solution? A connection between production and standby via
SQLNet8? That would mean instant recovery, wouldn't it? It's not what I
want.

> I guess the directory is NFS mounted.

Yes.

> Oracle has always warned *against* using NFS,

The solution Oracle advises is to use a directory on the production
machine and (if available) hardware or OS mirroring on that machine.
Neither solution helps when the production machine burns down.

> in the documentation no one cares to read.

Mr. Sybrand, I waded through about 1000 pages of documentation for this.
Documentation which is not always clear, documentation parts which at
times contradict each other.

Maybe I missed something? I wouldn't bet that I didn't - but I don't
care for your bullying attempts.